The Lucky Man Hits the Road, My Gosh

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I took a ferry out of New London to the far end of Long Island, the end that is not Brooklyn, this week, which is a big deal for a Midwesterner, the ocean breeze, the big bass honk of the ship’s horn, the expanse of the Sound. It was an easy choice between that and four hours on the Long Island Expressway. I am done with freeways insofar as possible.

My late brother Philip grew up in Minnesota, same as I, but he came to love the sea by reading Horatio Hornblower novels, and after he took a wrong turn into corporate life in a suit and tie, he got straightened out and took a job studying shoreline erosion and thermal pollution on Lake Michigan, much of the time aboard a boat, wearing a windbreaker. He never regretted leaving the office cubicle.

I don’t share his love of the sea and ships. I’m leery of the Sound after reading a story about sharks attacking swimmers. I don’t want my obituary to refer to my having been eaten by a fish. I prefer to die in a dim room, sedated, while telling the joke about the couple killed in a crash who arrive in heaven and find a beautiful golf course where the man tees up and hits a hole-in-one and turns to his wife and says, “If you hadn’t made me stop smoking, I could’ve been here years ago.”

The ferry landed at Orient Point and I headed to the town of Riverhead to do a stand-up show, still out on the road a week before my 81st birthday. I dread the prospect of retirement, which in so many cases leads to disintegration and dementia. I intend to go on performing until I reach the age of 98, beating my mother by one year, and I die after a wonderful evening singing and telling stories, shot by an envious rival.

I used to be a writer, wrote stories, novels, sonnets, then limericks, but I don’t know many happy writers over the age of 70. Writers tend to agonize, feeling that suffering is essential to literary eminence: this is a romantic view of literature, the tortured artist making something beautiful out of pain. Not I. I wrote because I like being alone and writing is the perfect excuse. But then I acquired an audience and once you do, you never look back.

I was the invisible middle child in a big family: there were the older responsible two and the young attractive three and then there was me, the glum misfit, and to find myself, an old man, standing in the wings of a theater, about to stride out on stage to applause and launch into comedy is pure pleasure, so much more so than golf or cribbage or whatever other old men do.

I love my work. I’m like the engineer who was sentenced to die at the guillotine but the blade wouldn’t drop so they were about to sentence him to prison instead but he looked up from where he lay and said, “No. Wait. Hand me a pair of pliers. I see where the problem is.” And he fixed it so he could be executed. Fixing was his line of work.

Comedians die too, of course, and the day will come. My audience is getting younger. I see people in the crowd who have only a slight memory of the 20th century. If I mention Richard Nixon, they look confused so I don’t. I don’t know what TikTok is or vogueing or pickleball. Irrelevance is on the horizon.
Someday the joke will be on me but not quite yet, God willing.

I did the show at Riverhead, had a touch of aphasia at the end, stood speechless, blank-faced for a minute and a half, and the audience looked concerned and then I recovered a few words and staggered to a conclusion and we sang “Auld Lang Syne” and I exited to find four EMT guys in the wings who’d been called by the stage manager. They put me on a gurney and wheeled me away and a few minutes later I recalled the stuff I had blocked on, or aphased, and was hauled to hospital and scanned, tapped, tested (“Follow my finger with your eyes.”), and found to be functional.

Unfortunate, I guess, but how will we find out about EMTs if there is no E? There are excellent people out there whose mission is to pick up the fallen. Thank God. And now that I know this, I don’t need to aphase again.

Garrison Keillor © 08.07.23